ZS @LogicalDash@mastodon.babycastles.com

Whitest videogame? #gameingTheory

It turned out that the hoarding instinct that young Jason developed when his mom kidnapped him and he could only bring what he "needed" motivated him to keep all those text files on floppies

When search engines showed up, he typed "bulletin board system" into one and found nothing

So he made textfiles.com

And that's #wordHack

There are a lot of strange little digressions that I can't capture here, but Bill is recording all of it. I'll get a link later if I can

Anyway there's a real IBM PC and then an acoustic coupler modem and BBSes

And that goes back to the Carter Phone Decision, where phone carriers tried to lock out modem usage of their wires, and failed

But to young Jason it was as if the computer itself had things to say

#wordHack

And now, Jason Scott @textfiles

Founder and curator of https://textfiles.com

Tells a story about how his otherwise estranged father tried to entertain him during the strictly limited times they were allowed together. At the time, in the 70s, there was a myth that technology made you better, so his father brought home the Commodore PET, with a terrible keyboard but Jason adapted and became fascinated

#wordHack

Bill renders an animation of the Babycastles logo spinning. We watch it draw individual frames for a couple minutes, then watch it at full speed

There aren't really layers or transparency, but you can fake it with a single "swap page" and "Color 0" which makes a color act *like* an alpha channel, but only for the purposes of the tool you are currently using--the color still displays in the image

I think there are 24 colors

#wordHack

Bill demonstrates DeluxePaint, which can be used for pretty sophisticated animations

You have to deal with a single layer of undo history and there aren't any real rulers so you have to count pixels all the time

Bill is also known as The Guru Meditation and is involved in the Westchester Amiga User Group

They're a video producer, and the Amiga was the first home computer that could reasonably be used for video production

Previously you'd have to add titles to your video using a special machine called the Chiron. It only had 5 fonts. The Amiga had Video Toaster that could do way more, 4,096 colors and things in 1985

#wordHack

On further inspection I think I captioned that image wrongly, it's just a file browser

#wordHack

Next up is AmigaBill, who is giving a presentation from a real hardware Commodore Amiga, piped thru a modern laptop for projector purposes

#wordHack

I think this one was some samples of barking dogs, or it resolved to that at the end, but it mostly sounded like colorful noise

https://bombemoji.bandcamp.com
https://natalie.bandcamp.com
https://natalie.computer

#wordHack

Natalie still has time so she does a music performance in SuperCollider that's even worse for my sensory buffers than the one at open projector and I have to leave the room

#wordHack

Varying the coordinates, strokes, colors and you can view all this at https://floatingincyber.space

#wordHack

Now, Natalie Braginsky @natling @natling

Presenting something made with p5.js

Defines a class Point with coordinates and a movement vector

Given 16 of these bouncing around randomly, you can make interesting shapes by using sets of 4 to control Bezier curves

Then you can make the classic Windows 3.1 screensaver by redrawing at a lower opacity

#wordHack

"China, the source of fantasy"

One commenter presumed the bag was produced in China and also thought Sonic was a pokemon. Because we can't talk about things without talking about people

#wordHack

Authentication (Buchold 2003)

Iconisation (Irvine and Gal 2000)

Racialization (Urcioli 1996)

Emily is doing their best to explain these but I didn't really get it

Anyway they read Reddit threads about Pobomic and observed these forces at work in them

#wordHack

Next two concepts that I'm not sure what they're for are enoughness and overcitationality

When you have enough cogent info to demarcate a taxonomic category

And when you have too much info, or it's not the right quality. (wrong "dosing")

So Pobomic is funny because overcitationality, I guess

#wordHack

Signs And Their Interactions: C.S. Peirce's First Trichotomy of Signs

Qualisign: the abstract ideal of greenness

Token: green frog

Types: specific green frogs, such as Kermit

Sign Constellations and Social Uptake:

Two of the same token may point to different types by co-ocurring signs eg. Platform boots, football gear

#wordHack

And now our first feature presenter, Emily Corvi, internet linguist who thinks silly questions often yield profound answers

The Bag, The Myth, The Legend

A presentation applying discourse analysis (in the semiotic sense) to Pobomic

#wordHack

The specific one shown here is Ice Cream Fish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Jn-61eEbAA

#wordHack